H&H managing director Andy Jackson said the effects of both installations were now being felt.

“We had a settling-in period but the digital press has already come to fruition. We are doubling the output on what we were doing on the previous Xerox presses. With our customers’ confidence in the machinery, we’re able to convert a traditional litho customer and sell the quality to them,” he said.

“It’s providing solutions for customers, where in the past a customer might have had a large print run of some brochures and they want another couple of hundred to keep them going for the rest of the year, they can do that now.

“The quality is so close to the litho that they are not getting such a sub-standard product.”

The Linoprint replaced a Xerox DocuColor 5000 digital press and a Xerox DocuColor 8002 and the stitching line replaced a 15-year-old Muller Martini Presto.

H&H has also created around 7,000sqm of new native woodland by adopting a carbon offsetting scheme led by the Premier Paper Group.

It initially had a scheme set up with Paperlinx UK, before the merchant fell into administration, but the printer was quickly approached by Premier, who work with the UK-based Woodland Trust. The new scheme has been in place for the past 15 months.

Sales director Dene Marshall said: “Because we’re in Cumbria, there’s a lot of tourism and farming here and a lot of our customers expect us to do our bit as far as the environment is concerned.

“When Paperlinx were still going we were involved with the World Land Trust (WLT). Once they went, Premier Paper came to us, did a presentation and it wasn’t really that complicated, it was just a case of us agreeing with them that we would pay a levy on the paper that we supplied.”

H&H has removed almost 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in creating the new woodland. It claimed to be the only Cumbrian printer involved in such a scheme.